Industries rely more and more on advanced technology. Accelerated computer evolution makes large-scale computation practical. Many enterprises are be­ ginning to benefit from more efficient allocation of resources and more effective planning, scheduling, manufacturing, and distribution by adopting state-of-the­ art decision support systems. Academics increasingly emphasize application­ driven research. All these forces have moved optimization from a pure class­ room and textbook terminology to an accepted tool in today's business world. This book chronicles and describes applications of combinatorial optimization in industry. A wide range of applications is included: manpower planning ¿ production planning ¿ job sequencing and scheduling ¿ manufacturing layout design ¿ facility planning ¿ vehicle scheduling and routing ¿ retail seasonal planning ¿ I! space shuttle scheduling, and telecommunication network design . ¿ The applications covered in this book comprise a representative set of industry sectors including electronics, airlines, manufacturing, tobacco, retail, telecom­ munication, defense, and livestock. These examples should encourage opera­ tions researchers and applied mathematicians by pointing out how the impor­ tance and practicality of optimization is starting to be realized by the manage­ ment of various organizations and how some pioneering developments in this field are beginning to bear fruit.

Preface. 1. Moving Toward an Integrated Decision Support System for Manpower Planning at Continental Airlines: Optimization of Pilot Training Assignments; Gang Yu, et al. 2. Shortcomings of MRP II and a New Planning Meta-Method; A. Kimms, A. Drexl. 3. The Development, Implementation and Use of a Package to Facilitate Planning and Production Scheduling in a Tobacco Processing Plant; M.G. Nicholls. 4. Stability Radius of an Optimal Schedule: A Survey and Recent Developments; Y.N. Sotskov, et al. 5. Scheduling Jobs with Sequence Dependent Setups on Coupled Lines; E.C. Sewell, J.C. Tan. 6. Optimizing the Radial Component Insertion Operations on PCBs; S.Y. Chang, et al. 7. Combinatorial Optimization in a Cattle Yard: Feed Distribution, Vehicle Scheduling, Lot Sizing, and Dynamic Pen Assignment; M. Dror, J.M.Y. Leung. 8. Optimizing a Retail Promotional Calendar by Mixed Integer, Linear Programming; S.A. Smith. 9. An Implementation of a System Using Heuristics to Support Decisions About Shop Floor Setup Changes; R. Dé. 10. Integrative Population Analysis for Better Solutions to Large-Scale Mathematical Programs; F. Glover, et al. 11. Lagrangian Relaxation for Flow Shop Scheduling; G.G. Polak. 12. A Heuristic for Vehicle Routing and Manpower Planning; G.A. Bohoris, J.M. Thomas. 13. Conceptual Design and Analysis of Rail Car Unloading Area; J.F. Bard. 14. A Study of the Space Shuttle Scheduling Problem; S.A. Brah, J.L. Hunsucker. 15. Models and Implementation Techniques for Local Access Telecommunication Network Design; Geon Cho, D.X. Shaw.Appendix A: Pseudo-Code of Algorithm 2.